Google Voice was GrandCentral before Google acquired that company back in 2007. Like most Google acquisitions it took a long time to fully rebuild the service on Google’s infrastructure, and even today Google Voice is still in private beta.
But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.
So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.
The email: → Read More
When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.
The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months. → Read More
One of the few necessary evils that accompanies the uber-cool recently launched Google Voice service (which was officially released in March) is the necessity to convert all of your numbers (cell, landline, office) to one number. It can be an annoying and daunting task to change your cell phone number, especially if you are reliant on your cell for business and personal communications. Mobile startup Skydeck’s new mashup with Google Voice may help you avoid the hassle of changing at least your cell phone number while still letting you use Google Voice.
While Google Voice is all your numbers online, Skydeck’s service, which came out of beta earlier this year, is just your cell phone online. Via an app on your cell phone, all your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is. Similar to Google Voice, you read a transcribed version of each voicemail (via SpinVox). It works best on Blackberry and Android phones (although most of the features work on nearly any phone), and costs $9.95 a month. → Read More
GrandCentral, a phone management service that first launched in 2006 and was acquired by Google for $50+ million in 2007, hasn’t been in the news much lately. Other than a few good natured jabs at their marketing gimmicks and coverage of outages, that is. Get ready for that to change as the service prepares for a public launch under a new product name: Google Voice.
The 21 month delay between acquisition and relaunch was, unfortunately, expected. Like most Google acquisitions, the service has been rebuilt from the ground up, a lengthy process that has in the past taken an average of 16 months or so.
Now, though, Google is ready to fully launch Grand Central/Google Voice. Key new features have been added that make the service absolutely compelling (each is described below). The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” Grand Central gives you one phone number that can access all your numbers, whether they be cell, home, mobile, and work numbers; the GrandCentral numbers stay the same, as many of these number change over the course of a user’s lifetime. Here’s our quick and dirty guide to using the old GrandCentral. → Read More
GrandCentral, a phone management service that first launched in 2006 and was acquired by Google for $50+ million in 2007, hasn’t been in the news much lately. Other than a few good natured jabs at their marketing gimmicks and coverage of outages, that is. Get ready for that to change as the service prepares for a public launch under a new product name: Google Voice.
The 21 month delay between acquisition and relaunch was, unfortunately, expected. Like most Google acquisitions, the service has been rebuilt from the ground up, a lengthy process that has in the past taken an average of 16 months or so.
Now, though, Google is ready to fully launch Grand Central/Google Voice. Key new features have been added that make the service absolutely compelling (each is described below). The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” Grand Central gives you one phone number that can access all your numbers, whether they be cell, home, mobile, and work numbers; the GrandCentral numbers stay the same, as many of these number change over the course of a user’s lifetime. Here’s our quick and dirty guide to using the old GrandCentral. → Read More
We don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a feature for sending text / SMS messages using the built-in Chat functionality.
Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google lists text messaging on its ‘What’s new‘ page (only for US phones, it seems).
Update: the Labs team found a glitch and is pushing the release back a bit (‘probably within two weeks’).
Update 2: make sure you read the open letter the Webmail team at AOL writes to Google. It’s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it’s really not and quite unprofessional to boot. → Read More
This is a strange story. Rumors circulated today that Silicon Valley based startup Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom, and VentureBeat ran with the story. The company later denied the rumors, but wouldn’t comment on whether or not merger discussions were occurring or not. The strange part is this – while Ribbit executives are denying the acquisition to the press, they’ve simultaneously been (quite happily) telling all their friends that BT has acquired them for $55 million, says a source who’s heard the story. BT plans to use the Ribbit platform to build out a GrandCentral competitor, they’ve said. GrandCentral, a service that manages all of your phone services, was acquired by Google in July 2007 for $50 million. Since the acquisition, however, GrandCentral has gone nowhere – no new features and intermittent down time are the only GrandCentral milestones over the last year. From past experience, this suggests a deal is in the process of closing but isn’t legally done yet, which gives executives the ability to deny acquisition rumors. But like most leaks, the company getting bought just can’t not tell their friends (loosely defined) all about it. Confidentially, of course. Ribbit has raised $13 million in capital. CrunchBase Information Ribbit Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program. But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily. Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back. How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?” Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there. There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks. The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert → Read More
GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through. We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline. If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users. GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back. Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage. Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog: I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service. Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker CrunchBase Information GrandCentral Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Most companies target early adopters with their new products, hoping those users will tell all of their friends all about it. But not GrandCentral, the company Google acquired for $50 million in July 2007. They’ve gone after the homeless demographic. Twice. Two years ago they offered to give homeless people free access to their (already free) service. It worked so well (4,000 signups) that yesterday they announced it all over again. This time Mayor Newsom threw in a bunch of sound bites about how this will “empower” the homeless, improve their morale, etc. (last time they were only able to get Newsom’s deputy chief of staff to comment). To be clear, I think it’s great that Google is trying to help out the homeless. But what I really applaud is the marketing audacity it takes to announce that you are making an already free service free for the homeless. And then do it again two years later. And to do it even though homeless people already have access to free voicemail through at least one nonprofit organization. I wonder if Google can pull off the same stunt in the future for new products. Free cloud storage for the homeless, anyone? Update: Good comment by Scott Rafer below with a different viewpoint: Please check with local experts when they are available. It’s all about SF politics, and the gimmick is Mayor Newsom’s not Google’s. I’m generally a supporter of this mayor, but his terrible Care-not-Cash program ripped prepaid mobile phones out of the hands of many working homeless — the people who have the best shot to get themselves out of trouble. They are often doing day work for employers who know the phone numbers at the homeless shelters and will not call them or accept calls from them. GrandCentral and similar services provide the Mayor with some air cover and are at least a mediocre replacement for prepaid phones in this use case. Update 2: GrandCentral cofounder Craig Walker responds in the comments. CrunchBase Information GrandCentral Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When it comes to connecting with new friends safely and privately, Jangl fits the bill. The “Social Communications Widget” lets you make calls, send SMSs, and leave voice mails without exposing anyone’s phone number through a simple widget. In contrast to their competitor, Jaxtr, they’ve been mainly spreading through a series of direct deals with social networking sites (Match.com, Tagged, AdultFriendFinder, and Fubar) and a Facebook/Bebo application (potentially on 80 million profiles). Jaxtr, on the other hand, has been spreading mainly through email links and personal websites (5 million users in under 5 months). Now they’ve forged a deal to be featured on the maverick of dating sites, PlentyOfFish. PlentyOfFish is like every other dating site you’ve heard of, but free. Free has actually paid off pretty well for founder Markus Frind, who runs the site from his Vancouver apartment and takes in over $10 million a year in advertising. Comscore ranked the site the number one dating site in December 2007, with an average of 1.3 billion page views a month (70,000 sessions and 3 million page views an hour). Jangl’s widget will let daters call each other, send SMSs, and leave voice mails all without sharing a real number. The functionality makes it easy to take the next step in a relationship without sacrificing privacy, or just discreet phone sex. Calls will be terminated on Jajah’s servers as part of their existing relationship. Like PlentyOfFish itself, Jangl will be monetizing the service through text advertising; a first for the company. On other sites, the service is either ad-free or paid for as part of membership (match.com). I’ve found social calling widgets (particularly Jaxtr and Jangl) to be the most attractive part of the VOIP market because they’re not competing in a race to the lowest calling rates, but adding real utility to our existing phone lines. Other voice widgets include Ccube, Tringme, and Snapvine. While monetization is still somewhat up in the air, both companies are testing out business models (paid Jaxtr minutes, or Jangl’s revenue sharing). Going forward we’ll see which models do and don’t work. I also expect both companies to continue adopting more advanced features similar to Google’s GrandCentral. CrunchBase Information Jaxtr Jangl Jajah GrandCentral Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie. http://www.tringme.com/tringme.swf?uid=1&username=TringMeTringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience. Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go. Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget. → Read More
So much for GrandCentral’s “one number for life” promise. The company is turning off customer phone numbers and giving them new ones following their acquisition by Google last month. Troy Schneider received such a notice, advising him that in 8 days his GrandCentral number would be canceled and that he would be required to immediately start using a new number allocated to him. Judi Sohn received the same message: with no prior warning she had 8 days left on her existing phone number then it would cease to operate. Sohn was fortunate to some extent: Google has offered to pay for the reprinting of her business cards, but that would appear to be a one off, and a token gesture at that. The inconvenience of losing a telephone number, particularly for a business, is more than just stationery. Paper telephone listings must be changed (some people still use them), sign writing must be fixed, and every single listing of the old number has to be found and changed. Most land line telephone providers would offer a redirection service for the old number, however with Google it’s simply a matter of 8 days then no more phone number. Every customer that tries calling the old number post cancellation and cannot connect to the business is potentially a lost sale. There was no comment at the time of writing from Google or GrandCentral. Ironically the last post on the GrandCentral blog talks about the wonders of being able to keep a GrandCentral Number for life. Update: Founder Craig Walker comments below and notes that this affected on 434 users: Everybody, thanks for your comments and I want to quickly reply to try to clear the air regarding this issue. I’ll post a full blog about this on the GrandCentral site in just a bit, but first I want to assure everybody that we are NOT disconnecting anyone’s service. Unfortunately we received word recently that one of our partners was stopping their service in part of the country and since that time we’ve been working to port those phone numbers to other partners. We’ve done this successfully for the vast majority of those users but unfortunately there were approximately 400 users whose numbers could not be ported (434 to be exact). As soon as we found out these users could not be ported to other partners, we contacted those users, set up an → Read More
My family is a GrandCentral family. We’re all like “Hey, honey, GrandCentral me!” and my wife is all like “I just GrandCentralled your mother. And your son just GrandCentralled in his diaper.” That’s how we roll. We love the service, which is part secretary, part answering machine, and part forwarding service. Check it out. When I signed up, they were giving out phone numbers that you can use to forward all of your calls, which was very cool. Well, it looks like Google has GrandCentralled GrandCentral and that the days of free phone numbers might be over. → Read More
Google has confirmed the Grand Central Acquisition we suspected would be announced today or tomorrow. No official word on a price, but we believe it’s in the $50 million range. Google will be moving the service over to Google’s network. A limited number of invitations for GrandCentral beta accounts will still be available. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service. → Read More
A follow up to our post a week ago: A source close to the deal has confirmed to us that Google has closed the acquisition of GrandCentral and will be announcing it this week, probably today or tomorrow. Acquisitions are generally announced after the close of market, so look for this after 1 pm PST on the Google blog or in a press release (or both). If not today, possibly tomorrow. We have been unable to get the company or Google to comment on this, but our source is solid. We still don’t have confirmation of a price, but we’ve heard it’s in the Jotspot range – $50 million or more. When the deal is announced we’ll hopefully hear details on planned integration with Gtalk, Gmail, etc. Our overview of GrandCentral features is here. → Read More
Google is the Galactus of the Interwebs. When the giant gets hungry it simply goes out and finds a meal in which case GrandCentral is breakfast for today. In case you’re joining us and have no idea what GrandCentral is then stop on over here for the lowdown. The exact specifics about the deal are still under wraps, but Michael at TechCrunch feels it’s a great move on Google’s part. What Google will do with GrandCentral is up for speculation, but it will definitely boost their arsenal to take on the likes of Skype and other IM clients. Galactus is growing and its appetite will not be suppressed for much longer. Google To Acquire GrandCentral [TechCrunch] → Read More
Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral, we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price. Just last week I flagged this company as the most exciting startup we’re currently tracking. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time. The company, which has raised less than $6 million in capital from Minor Ventures (the exact amount has never been disclosed), beta launched just last September. Earlier this year mainstream press and blogger attention heated up. The company may have received too much press attention before the product was ready, and we reported on some backlash from beta users abandoning the service in March. Still, the company pushed ahead, launching a mobile product and other features. GrandCentral was recently pitching a second round of financing to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but broke off discussions abruptly as the Google talks heated up. I’m speculating on where Google will use GrandCentral, but the synergies with Gmail and GTalk are fairly obvious and could be the next step in Google’s competition with Skype and other instant messaging platforms. This is, in my opinion, a great move by Google. Grand Central is an awesome productivity and simplifies the lives of users with multiple phones by giving them a single phone number and letting them handle calls via rules. It’s a natural fit with GTalk and Gmail. Google won’t comment on this story. I have an email in to GrandCentral to see if they’ll confirm. → Read More
TechCrunch has had running coverage of telephone management startup GrandCentral since their debut in September of last year. MobileCrunch covered the release of their mobile client recently. Today they’ve come out with a useful guide to the service. Here’s our summary: GrandCentral is telephone management service that connects all your phones and adds some new features. To add GrandCentral to your phones, you don’t need to change the phones you already have, you just need to connect them to a new GrandCentral number. With all your phones connected to single GrandCentral number, you’ll have access to new features like central voicemail, call forwarding, call screening, custom greetings, call recording, and spam filtering whenever anyone calls your new number. Setup You can get a GrandCentral number by going to their site and entering an area code or state and choosing an available number from their list. Getting a number also sets up an online management account where you can tweak the individual features. To enable GrandCentral on your phones you’ll just have to enter your existing phone numbers into this account and get your contacts to call this new number. Management From you management page you can control how your phone responds based on who calls. For instance, you can set up a business group that always rings through to your business line, or a friends group, that always rings all your phones. For each group or individual you can also control the ringtone an greeting they hear. When a call does go through, callers will be asked to state their name if they’re not already on your contact list. Voicemail Voicemail is one of GrandCentral’s strongest features. Whenever a call goes to voicemail, you can wait and listen to the message in real time before jumping in, or let it get logged onto your GrandCentral account. All voicemail is stored in a play list on your GrandCentral account, meaning you can access it from any computer. You can also embed messages onto a website. GrandCentral has said that they will soon be releasing a feature that automatically transcribes voicemails into text and will deliver them to you via email or SMS. GrandCentral also has a mobile version that makes these features available on you mobile. GC also has a click to call button for your website and can forward calls to your Gizmo account. → Read More
Michael has just posted an extremely detailed guide to Grand Central, one of our favorite web/phone services. The guide includes all the secret button presses that we forgot to read about in the online manual and breaks down the service into easy to understand chunks. The center of the Grand Central universe is your Grand Central phone number. This is (theortically) the last phone number you will ever give out, so picking one that you like is important. The GC registration process begins by picking an area code or U.S. state. Once you’ve done that, GC will show you a number of available phone numbers. If you want to see if any of the numbers spell anything interesting or memorable, check out this site, which will show you various words made from the numbers. The TechCrunch Quick Guide To GrandCentral [TechCrunch] → Read More
